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Comment by protastus | Hacker News Reader

Given the evidence, every nation of the world should have a massive federally funded project on the scale of the Apollo program to put the brakes on global warming and biodiversity loss.

It blows my mind that we haven't dropped all luxuries and transitioned into the analog of a war economy to address what is literally, without hyperbole, the worst catastrophe humanity has ever seen and will likely ever see, by any definition.

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People don’t believe it will happen, or assume engineering and science will save the day. If people really understood the significance of what’s happening, funding for this stuff would be #1, 2, and 3 in terms of priorities, far ahead of universal health care or free college. But again, nobody believes it will happen, or assume that engineers and scientists will save the day.

Fun fact: taxing consumption (the thing that destroys the environment) at the same rate as a typical EU country would raise almost a trillion dollars annually that the US could direct towards funding research and development into climate change solutions.

The key issue is we don't really have a "world government" to force all countries to do this.

With our current system of every nation having its own government, whichever nation does most to stop climate change will disadvantage itself relative to other nations.

The nice thing though is that we can all have as many children as we want, because apparently massively increasing the planet's population in future won't contribute to global warming/ecological collapse, whereas forcing me to switch my 3 litre BMW for a hybrid and to stop eating burgers will magically solve everything /s.

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